In Search of Floor 7

In Search of Floor 7½

Jochen Volz

The building that houses the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo is defined by its history and by the multiple uses it has been adapted to fulfill since its completion in 1901, from its transformation into a bank in the 1920s, and to its re-inauguration as a multidisciplinary cultural center another eighty years later. Ofices, public spaces, and even the bank’s vaults have been transformed into galleries, a cinema, a theater, cafés, and corridors. Regardless of its function, however, this edifice has always contained spaces accessible to the public alongside a large quantity of rooms restricted to administrative or technical business. The idiosyncrasies of the building lie in the contradictions between its impressive façade and grand halls, and its narrow and complex spaces through which we must circulate. Visiting exhibitions distributed over the five floors of the building, one notices immediately the ways in which contemporary risk assessments, accessibility laws, and evacuation regulations have led to disproportional numbers of elevators, doors, emergency exits, fire extinguishers, and escape signage. In particular, CCBB exhibitions in São Paulo do not conform to the modern ideal of ofering the audience a continuous experience of an exhibition, but instead are notable for their discontinuity. This is not necessarily negative. In demanding a remarkable efort from the visitor to orient his- or herself within the labyrinth, the disruptive nature of the building’s layout encourages a degree of appropriation. Appropriation is here interpreted as a mental activity of organizing the architecture into a personal, arrogated house, constructed by the individual’s discovery of accesses and shortcuts, hidden corners, forbidden doors and staircases. In this elusive, even beautiful manner, the CCBB in São Paulo demands physical activity from its audience and in return seems to provoke imaginative engagement.

Taking a tour through the building, one is reminded of Craig Schwartz, the unemployed puppeteer gaining a filing job at LesterCorp in Spike Jonze’s acclaimed film Being John Malkovich. This fictitious organization is situated somewhat unexpectedly in low-ceiling ofices on Floor 7½ of the Mertin Flemmer Building in New York City. In the film, Craig finds, concealed behind a filing cabinet, access to a low and narrow corridor that sucks people into the mind of famous actor John Malkovich for the duration of fifteen minutes. The Mertin Flemmer Building is artfully revealed to us as more than just a piece of architecture—it is the portrait of a human construct, which yields to mental transformations. It is an image as much as it is a container, a representation of a mental state full of enclosures, ups and downs, openings and leaks, claustrophobia and generosity; ambiguous in all aspects, a portal to a diferent reality.

The CCBB Building in São Paulo is clearly not the Mertin Flemmer Building in New York, but it seems to ofer similar portals that demand to be discovered. To develop an exhibition here that intentionally highlights the building’s features and examines its eclectic style and its particular spatial and functional organization is to provoke investigations into the imaginative self of the building; the edifice as an organism, as a machine, as a mental map.

Planos de Fuga — Uma Exposição em Obras [Plans for Escape — An Exhibition under Construction] takes its inspiration from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel Plan de evasión [A Plan for Escape], published in Argentina in 1945. This captivating story revolves around the figure of Henrique Nevers, a Frenchman sent to a penal colony in French Guiana. There, on the isolated island of Cayerme, Nevers meets the prison’s governor Castel, who experiments with the minds and perception of his inmates with sadistic pleasure. His aim is to modify certain elements of their brains in such a way that the detainees experience feelings of freedom and happiness despite the fact that they remain locked in isolation. Plan de evasión is a novel full of imaginative ideas and fascinating symbolism, which come about as a result of Casares’ choice of narrator: the story is told from the point of view of Nevers’ uncle, who receives accounts of Cayerme in letters from his nephew, which are amalgamated with his own speculations and interpretations. “Actual” events are thus obfuscated and rendered opaque, inviting the reader to draw—and invent—their own conclusions.

Despite the novel’s horrors, this great classic of the twentieth century is a fabulous examination of the afects of spatial confinement and the imaginary plans for escape that these conditions inspire or, in more abstract terms, an allegory about the potency of physical and mental reactions to space. Here, naturally, lies the home of art and fiction and unsurprisingly the novel has inspired visual artists and poets ever since its release. For example, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster created her Park — A Plan for Escape in 2002 for Documenta11, directly appropriating Casares’ title. For the Karlsaue Park in Kassel (Germany), Gonzalez-Foerster made a park within a park, bringing together a

large group of props from the most diverse parts of the world, such as a public telephone from Rio de Janeiro, a lava-stone from Mexico, and a rose bush from Le Corbusier’s rose garden in Chandigarh (India), amongst many others. This elegant dialogue with Casares suggested physical and mental states of being in and longing for other spaces. There, the park was the point of departure for a fictional journey around the world, or perhaps an unrevealed fictional narrative allowed for the remotest places to temporarily unite on one lawn.

Between ofice edifices, bank headquarters, and pawnshops, the CCBB building is the architectural jewel of a small pedestrian area at the crossing of Rua Álvares Penteado and Rua da Quitanda. The site is obviously diferent than the imaginary island of Cayerme or in the Karlsaue Park and, as stated above, even though equipped with enclosed corridors, there are most likely no low-ceiling ofices like those of LesterCorp in New York. However, it is interesting to keep these three distant scenarios in mind when looking at the artistic proposals brought together or especially developed for this exhibition.

Planos de Fuga — Uma Exposição em Obras is an exhibition conceived in response to the institution that is hosting it, and the building where it is installed. It is an exhibition that can only take place here and now. This is partly because many of the artworks included have been conceived for a specific location within the building and could not be transported or adapted to another situation. But it is also because this exhibition aims at stimulating dialogues between the art, the audience, the institution, the building, and its urban surroundings, at activating its context, which is local and singular. Site-specificity is the term used in art theory to describe distinct features of the relationship between the physical and mental form of a work of art with its mental and physical context, its immediate surroundings.

Despite the fact that the artworks included embrace a wide range of techniques, conceptual strategies, diverse materiality and scale, they do attend to a set of recurring questions of obscurantism and revelation, disguise and the discovery of new perspectives. All artworks in the exhibition are more than physical objects; they are exercises in spatial perception, in the architectural and conceptual definitions of an exhibition and in the appropriation of a building and its history. Carla Zaccagnini, Cristiano Rennó, Gabriel Sierra, Marcius Galan, and Sara Ramo have been commissioned to create new works respectively for the building’s façade, the central hall, the main exhibition space, the corridors, and circulation areas as well as the large vaults in the basement. Each artist operates within her or his own artistic language, but all works clearly play with visitors’ orientation within the building. Whereas Zaccagnini ofers new ways of reading the institution’s name, Rennó provokes a grand sensation of vertigo from various points of view throughout the building. While Sierra’s installation interrogates conventional definitions of exhibition architecture, the backdrop, and the picture, Galan’s sculptural interventions delightfully confuse the visitor, who then is taken by Ramo onto a labyrinthine journey to the institution’s mental core. The installations by Cildo Meireles and Rivane Neuenschwander, both presented in the exhibition in new adaptations and for the first time in Brazil, introduce additional layers of meaning to the exhibition’s thematic framework, such as speculation, surveillance, and paranoia. And so do the group of works from the early 1970s by Claudia Andujar, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Kinmont, which are key historical contributions to the idea of a subjective appropriation of the house, the city, and the landscape.

Renata Lucas’ Plan de evasión (2010) is clearly another important source of inspiration to this exhibition. The artist has taken Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel in its original Spanish edition, divided it into six fragments, and inserted these into a selection of existing books by other authors. These subtly altered books are then brought back into the normal circulation of printed matter, in bookshops, libraries, and reading spaces. When seen on a shelf or a table, it is almost impossible to tell which are the modified books. A reader of any book, then, could all of a sudden encounter Bioy Casares where she or he was expecting other content. Appropriating one of the oldest techniques of sending secret messages out of prison, Lucas’ work physically escapes the exhibition but also expands its geographical and temporal boundaries. As much as the work in large parts lives as a rumor, it also serves as a truly literal and conceptual backdrop to the modes of operation being examined by this exhibition.

Last but not least, Mauro Restife has been commissioned to create this book, which is as much part of the exhibition as it is the portrait of its context, a narrative of its making of, and its documentation. From the very first sitevisits with artists to the CCBB, Restife has observed the development of the

exhibition on site while photographing the institution’s surrounding neighborhood for months. The results take the form of photographic essays, edited for this publication, which are subjective reports on Planos de Fuga — Uma Exposição em Obras, similarly incomplete as Henrique Nevers’ reports to his uncle in Bioy Casares’ novel, similarly provoking imaginative interpretations and completions on the part of the reader.

This exhibition and this publication pay tribute to the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil as a building and as an institutional program, in a physical and mental dimension, but also as a place for critical reflection and contextualization. Art has the capacity to constantly dwell on the incapacity of existing methods of describing the system we are part of. It has provided new tactics and strategies with which to challenge, evaluate, and describe the modern and contemporary conditions of uncertainty. It is an endless series of new tools and manuals artists have invented in order to point to subjects such as order and disorder, inversion, misunderstanding, chance, and change. Take me to Floor 7½, please!